Suffering And Healing

As the first African American Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Toni Morrison has become a household name in American literary arena and exerted vibrating influence upon the world literature. Since Toni Morrison published the first novel, she has been focusing on black women's living conditions and internal states. Meanwhile , she constantly and diligently sought the healing solutions to black women's sufferings. The paper strings many black women figures in Toni Morrison's novels together, striving to study their sufferings and healing comprehensively.The history of African American was mixed with both black men and women's tears and blood. The black women figures in Morrison's works endure diverse sufferings such as those caused by society, history, race, and sex. The first half of the paper is composed of four chapters. The first chapter mainly elaborates black women's struggles in the bottom of society. In America, racial and sexual discrimination has been always an obstinate social disease, which is reflected in Morrison's novels. Black women cannot achieve self-fulfilment and their social status is much lower than that of any other people. The second chapter mainly exposes black women's great pain imposed by the White during the period of slavery. Having been deprived of almost every right, black women found it impossible to possess their own bodies and feelings. The third chapter probes black women's distorted spirits under their white masks . Affected by the dominant white culture , a few black women are eager to abandon their ancient properties and accept the internalized white norms. The fourth chapter discusses the grief that the sexual identity "woman" brings toblack women. They are degraded to a second sex subordinate to men..Morrison not only describes black women's sufferings in her novels ,but also manages to search various solutions to heal their pain. The second half of the paper, which comprises of four chapters , centers on healing .The first chapter analyzes the important role mother plays in healing .In African American culture, mothers undertake four interrelated tasks, namely, preservation, nurturance ,cultural bearing and healing. On one hand, motherhood and maternal love guarantee the physical survival of the children. On the other hand, they help the child to develop a strong and authentic selfhood as a black person, which enables them to be more powerful when resisting possible pain. The second chapter probes the healing power of sisterhood. After building a harmonious relationship through sisterhood ,black women gather their isolated individual power together to comfort and heal each other .The third chapter discusses the healing power of going South to seek the root of the black. The journey to the South can make suffering black women related to their ancestors and black culture, thus get healed. The last chapter mainly elaborates the healing power of collective solidarity. As a writer having a strong sense of community , Morrison argues that a black person can scarcely survive without community. The community as a whole possesses stronger power than an individual, which can provide a black person with necessary shelter and comfort.